Garry Marshall

Garry Marshall (1934-2016) never thought about a career in television until he watched the variety comedy series Caesar's Hour. "...It was the most influential show cause I looked I said, 'I could do that.' The others I didn't relate to," he says. Marshall's lively interview consists of many entertaining anecdotes about his over forty years in the television business. In his three-hour Archive interview, he describes his early years as a journalist and his eventual entry into comedy writing for The Tonight Show with Jack Paar. He talks about his work honing his craft as a writer on such '60s sitcoms as The Joey Bishop Show, The Dick Van Dyke Show and The Lucy Show. He speaks in detail about developing The Odd Couple for television with his partner Jerry Belson. He then discusses helming some of the most popular sitcoms of the 1970s, including Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley and Mork & Mindy. For these shows he details the casting, development and production as well as discusses the impact these series had on ABC. Finally, he briefly talks about his entry into feature filmmaking, offering this advice to aspiring producers, "use Julia Roberts" (she starred in his "Pretty Woman"). Karen Herman conducted the interview on August 28, 2000 at Marshall's Falcon Theatre in Toluca Lake, CA.